Pitman's Own Private Iceberg

Titanica!

HERBERT
Pitman appeared to lose confidence following the shattering experience through
which he passed in April 1912.

Anyone might.

The Titanic's Third Officer broke down while giving evidence in America at the
point when he was asked about the piteous noises made by those drowning in the
water.

"Crying, shouting, moaning," he vividly remembered.
But his leadership position had shown him an obvious duty. He ordered his lifeboat
back to the vicinity.

Senator Smith: You were in command. They ought to
have obeyed your orders?

Pitman: So they did.

Smith: They did not, if you told them to pull toward
the ship.

Pitman: They commenced pulling toward the ship, and
the passengers in my boat said it was a mad idea on my part to pull back
to the ship, because if I did, we should be swamped..."

Pitman, in command, with braid on his sleeve, allowed himself to be overruled
by a group of complaining civilians.

He ordered his men to abandon the attempt. They pulled in the oars and lay quiet,
listening for an hour to the myriads who were thrashing in their final throes
or silently succumbing nearby.

In Pitman's case, the survivor guilt must therefore have been especially overpowering.

Whenever he recovered from the most immediate trauma to think
about going back to sea, it seems that part of his self-adopted therapy was
to aim to be the best officer he could in the years thereafter

But his own private iceberg lay in waiting, with the same invisibility.

It would destroy his deck career forever

Not just Pitman, but the Board of Trade had been encouraged
to smarten up credentials in the wake of the Titanic disaster.

As it happened, a new report was just in from a committee which had been deliberating
on a single aspect of marine safety. This time the Board of Trade would not
hesitate about implementing its recommendations, as it had fatally deferred
lifeboat recommendations in 1911. The Board now speedily adopted the toughest
standards possible.

Herbert Pitman, preparing to subject himself to what would otherwise have been
a routine re-examination in September 1912, was about to collide with personal
and professional misfortune.

He would fall victim to a Titanic syndrome which,
it might be argued, was all about giving the Board of Trade a double-bottom
against future mishap.

On June 24, 1912, a report was issued by the committee appointed the previous
year "to enquire what degree of colour blindness or defect of form vision
in persons holding responsible positions at sea causes them to be incompetent
to discharge their duties."

It had also been charged with advising whether any alterations
were desirable in the BoT sight tests then in force for persons serving or intending
to serve in the Merchant Service.

Captain Norman Craig, MP.

The committee found no evidence of casualties arising from
defective vision, nor even a trustworthy estimate of the collisions and strandings
caused by bad lookout. But it became seized with the evidenceof two colour blind
gentlemen - one an unnamed Royal Navy officer, and the other the yachtsman Captain
Norman Craig, MP. Craig had originally been booked on the Titanic but
cancelled because of parliamentary business.

The product of examining these two gentlemen demonstrated "how great is
the difficulty which colour blindness causes persons who have to draw inferences
from the colours of lights at sea."

Experiments carried out by the committee at Shoeburyness, along the Maplin Sand,
showed that such defective vision "may render a man incapable of distinguishing
the colour of a ship’s lights, this effect being most marked at the greater
distances, that is, 2,000 and 3,000 yards."

The two mariners "made 30pc mistakes in the lights shown to them at a distance
of 2,000 yards."

Shocked at these findings, the Board of Trade committee recommended outright
war on colour blindness.

And despite the fact that the committee recorded that it "cannot say definitely
what degree of colour defect is compatible with the granting or retention of
a certificate," it proposed a series of recommendations which "will
make it much more difficult in future for a person with dangerous colour defect
ever to pass the test."

The above paragraph shows the inherent weakness of adopting such a stringent
rule - the committee had no idea what level of colour blindness was tolerable,
yet it was determined to adopt an absolutist approach. It would probably have
been surprised to discover that colour blindness, in varying degree, affects
one man in twenty.

Are You Colour Blind?

If you cannot see a swirl of orange dots crossing this image you may have a form of colour blindness.
Link : Explanation and examples

Herbert Pitman was mildly colour blind.

Pitman was aged only 34 in 1912, a young man who had been at
sea precisely half his life.

He could not have operated as a deck officer if he was severely colour blind,
since in its extremity the condition means being unable to tell red from green.

This is an obviously important matter, as a ship's port light is red, and her
starboard light green.

An inability to distinguish between them could stand the observer vessel into
grave danger of collision.

Ships are supposed to pass red-to-red (keeping to starboard) under the rules
of the road.

Mistaking another ship's red light as a green one (on indeed vice versa) could
mean a failure to discern a vessel as oncoming until it is too late.

Long experience compensates considerably for a certain decline
in physical fitness due to age, but the Board of Trade promulgated in July 1912
that "no person who is liable to fail to detect the presence or to confuse
the colours of average ships‘ sidelights at a distance of one mile is
competent to discharge the duties of an Officer of the Watch."

It added in a Titanic-influenced note that it "would
not be safe to depend on binoculars to compensate for defective sight."

Into
this gathering nightmare walked Pitman, who had been four years as an apprentice
with James Nourse Ltd., three years as an officer in the same employ; a year
in the Blue Anchor Line running to Australia, six months in the Shire Line sailing
to Japan, and five years with White Star.

Pitman, the soon-to-be-judged Incompetent.

Pitman who had passed the existing eyesight test seven times during his past
career.

Ah, the old days. In the old days it was a matter of paying a fee of one shilling,
to be examined by a superintendent who would promptly issue a certificate.

Masters and officers were encouraged by their shipping lines to periodically
obtain the certs.

Yet in the anomalous days before the Titanic disaster,
lookouts were not obliged by law to pass any eyesight tests at all.

For them it was purely voluntary. In the crow's nest of the
Titanic, Fred Fleet had not been tested since 1907, and Reg Lee not
since his army days in 1900.*

Alfred Young, Professional Member of the Board of Trade, explained to the British
Inquiry why different standards could apply:

"The man on the look-out has to report a light, and the officer decides
himself as to whether that is a red or green light. That is one of the reasons
why a seaman need not be subjected to precisely the same test as an officer."

It is difficult not to see the above extract as anything other than class-ridden
addle-headedness. As it stood, a lookout could not call out exactly what he
saw - a red light, for example - but only a light. In the days before the Titanic sank, it could very well be that a colour-blind officer would decide on the
fundamental matter of whether a light was red or green. The implications of
what was cheerfully disclosed to Lord Mersey are staggering in retrospect.

It is also not difficult to see that the eyesight testing regime was itself
utterly defective. Yet it also bordered on the laughable.

Before the 1912 committee report, officers had a colour test
that could only weed out the most extreme forms of colour blindness. It was
a literal form of woolly thinking, because it involved bits of wool... with
candidates picking out from a bunch of ten different coloured wools the samples
they thought best matched a test skein. Picking up wispy blobs in the brightness
of a morning surgery obviously different greatly from appraising lights in the
pitch black of the Atlantic.

Amazingly, the Board of Trade now kept the wool test (eventually scrapped in
WW1) and supplemented this sheepishness with a lantern test - for use, not in
daylight, but in simulated night conditions. That meant a darkened room.

The Board adopted the committee's design of a lantern with two apertures, showing
light through twelve glasses - four reds, four greens, and four whites - which
could be arranged in various combinations.

The new standard was "recommended" to the main shipping
lines with advice that it would be enforced from January 1914. It also required
"nearly normal visual acuteness" and a separate testing of each eye
in relation to form vision. This meant the standard Snellen's board, being lines
of diminishing-size letters familiar from stereotype.

Alarm quickly spread through shipping circles at these new requirements.

The Chamber of Shipping and the Liverpool Steamship Owners Association unanimously
declared that the old standards had been high enough, and warned that the Board
should not rush into tougher rules without adequate forethought.

The Board tartly responded that "in the case of the latter Association,
out of a gross tonnage of nearly four millions controlled by members, one and
a half million tons are owned by firms who prove by their actions that they
do not regard the Board of Trade tests as wholly adequate to secure the efficiency
of their own officers. These firms either enforce a higher standard than that
hitherto enforced by the Board, or adopt the precaution of periodically examining
the vision of their officers."

It added pointedly: "At an inquiry at a shipping casualty, witnesses as
to lights and signals should always be tested for colour and form vision. Any
officer should be held to be incompetent if his visual acuteness in the better
eye has fallen to half-normal."

But the anger and controversy would not die, as the following
attests:

SIGHT TESTS FOR SEAMEN

To the Editor of The Times

Sir -

One of the saddest instances of my career is when I have to
give a verdict that one of our Mercantile Marne officers, who has been many
years at sea, is colour blind.

He may have passed the Board of Trade test for colour vision
many times, and then fails and is brought to me. I recently examined a man who
had been rejected by the Board of Trade but who had previously passed the same
test three times. As this was a test of congenital colour blindness, if he had
been examined as to his ability to test coloured lights, he would have been
detected in the first instance.

When I examined him with the new Board of Trade wool tests,
in the presence of Mr A. W. Porter, he passed it with the greatest ease and
accuracy. I would not have suspected that he was colour blind. When, however,
he was examined with my lantern, he called green red and white green, and it
is quite obvious that he would have been very dangerous in command of a vessel.

The Board of Trade tests also reject many normal sighted persons,
and those with slight and unimportant defects of colour perception.

The Board of Trade form vision tests are also of the most primitive
description. It should be noted that no medical man is employed as an examiner,
and on appeal, a physicist examines the case. The Admiralty use the most efficient
methods of testing their officers, and it seems extraordinary that the Board
of Trade, at the chief centre of examination in the largest city in the world,
should employ methods which would be rejected by a medical man in a small village.

A thorough inquiry into the methods of the Board of Trade is
needed in the interests of the Mercantile Marine and of the nation.

Faithfully yours,

F. W. L. Edridge-Green

London, February 15th.

(The Times, Thursday March 6, 1913, p.18)

More and more spirited letters poured in, including this one:

SIGHT TESTS FOR THE MERCANTILE MARINE

To the Editor of The Times

Sir -

You have very kindly inserted several letters for me on the
above subject. Will you kindly give your readers the benefit of the following
case, which admirably illustrates our contention that incalculable harm is going
to be quite unnecessarily inflicted in the direction of depleting the ranks
of Mercantile Marine officers, unless the new Form Vision tests are repealed?

I repeat - what the late Sir Walter Howell himself admitted
- that no single accident can be traced to faulty form vision on the part of
an officer.

The case is as follows: - An officer in the Allan Line has been
failed in the new Board of Trade eyesight tests, and has had to accept an assistant
pursership in that company. The said officer was admirably qualified in every
other way, and his experience of a since-school lifetime has, at one blow, been
rendered useless, all through the unjustifiable and unnecessary excess requirement
of the eye-testing department.

His case will be the case of hundreds, and scores of steamers
will be laid up through a shortage of officers unless the Board of Trade realise
their awful mistake. That eventually they will do is certain; why not pocket
pride and do so at once, and so earn a meed of praise from the ship owner?

Yours etc,

John Glynn,

14 Chapel Street, Liverpool. May 1st.

(The Times, Wednesday May 7, 1913. p. 24)

It is noteworthy that Glynn, a shipowner, believed that the
new eyesight tests would cause "scores of steamers" to be laid up
for want of officers. This surely would be The Iceberg's greatest triumph -
not only to have sunk the Titanic, but to have prevented dozens of vessels from
ever going to sea at all.

And then came Pitman, for the iceberg had done for him too
-

MERCANTILE MARINE SIGHT TESTS

The Case of an Officer of the Titanic

To the Editor of The Times

Sir -

With regard to the cruel case of an Allan Line officer, who was one of the victims of the Board of Trade sight tests, which is furnished in your columns by that well-known ship owner Mr John Glynn, allow me to put a parallel case, that of the surviving Third Officer of the Titanic, one of the finest specimens of British Mercantile Marine officer that I have come across - and I know many.

Prior to going to see 17 years ago he passed the Board of Trade
sight tests. But he took the precaution of guaranteeing as far as possible his
safety in this respect for the professional career upon which he was embarking.
During his career he has passed the Board of Trade sight tests in both colour
and form vision seven times.

Since the loss of the Titanic he presented himself for a further
test under the then prevailing instructions of the White Star Line that their
Captains and Officers should go through these tests periodically. He was then
failed, and has now been invited by the Board of Trade voluntarily to surrender
his certificate.

We have at present in hand 26 cases of our members similar to
this, where fine young officers have been robbed of their livelihoods. The ex-Third
Officer of the Titanic was, I should say, most sympathetically treated by the
White Star Line, who have now appointed him as an assistant purser on one of
their biggest vessels.

These eyesight tests are impractical and unfair, and a gross
imposition on a most worthy class of the community. Furthermore, they are of
great national moment in diminishing the supply of officers of the Merchant
Service.

May I venture to hope that, with the publicity you have so kindly
ventured to give to this matter, we shall soon see the Board of Trade substantially
modifying their present attitude - that is, by throwing off the present tests
as hopeless and unjust, and adopting some reasonable and practical tests in
accordance with actual seafaring conditions.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

T. W. Moores

Secretary, the Imperial Merchant Service Guild,

Lord Street, Liverpool.

(The Times, Tuesday May 13, 1913. p.3)

The only mainstream Titanic publication to mention
Pitman's subsequent career is Don Lynch's Illustrated History. It seems to imply
that retirement to the job of purser came gradually for the Third Officer:

"Herbert Pitman remained at sea for thirty-five more years,
although failing vision forced him to leave the bridge and join the purser's
staff. For a period he even found himself serving aboard the Olympic. A widower,
he retired to the town of Pitcombe, England, where he lived with a niece until
his death in December 1961."

The point is that Pitman's eyesight did not slowly fail until
he voluntarily reconciled himself to a less stressful occupation. Within months
of the Titanic disaster he had seen his certificate ordered surrendered
by the Board of Trade when his eyesight was just as good as it had always been.

It seemed the Pitman case may have sparked a small rebellion among officers at White Star, because the company announced pay and watch improvements in April 1913, and also that:

"The officers will not, as hitherto, be required to undergo the sight tests at the Board of Trade, but will be examined by the company's own doctor."

It was too late for Pitman, as it was in May 1915, when the rules for eyesight and teeth
were relaxed by the Admiralty and Board of Trade simultaneously in light of
the exigencies of national survival.

"Candidates who have been rejected for bad teeth or defective vision may
present themselves again," declared the Board of Trade nobly.

Wisely, it never reimposed the same standards on the cessation of hostilities.

But perhaps some would see a rough justice in the case of Herbert Pitman.

The officer who had taken his cue from passengers in April
1912 remained taking orders from passengers for the rest of his career.